A growing IT services firm has come to Coventry to connect with skilled staff – with plans to double its workforce within 18 months.

Malleus was launched two years ago as a sister company to Basingstoke-based IT distributor Hammer, which has a turnover of more than £110million and 140 employees.

Malleus provides channel-only IT services – based on expertise in virtualisation, servers, networking and storage – to the specifications of Hammer’s reseller community, helping to improve products before they reach the end user.

But in order to drive the company forward, Malleus has moved from Solihull to the University of Warwick Science Park’s Business Innovation Centre in Binley.

Paul Hickingbotham is technical director at Malleus and feels Binley is the perfect position from which to develop the company given the site’s well-connected base and links with the university – as the firm aims to employ more technical staff.

He said: “Hammer has established itself as an industry leader over the past 20 years and this provides Malleus, as a sister company, with the stability and the flexibility to grow based around customer demand.

“It also ensures Malleus has an element of business agility, meaning we can react quickly to demands for new skills and technologies, and also recruit new employees as needed.

“The aim is to double our team within the next 18 months, bringing on five or six new technical staff, solution architects and systems engineers. Hopefully a number of these will be graduates looking to develop their IT skills.

“Being at the Business Innovation Centre gives flexibility to grow, good links to the university and also a central geographical position, from which to manage the growth of the business and to best support our geographically diverse client base.”

Penny Robb is the centre manager at the University of Warwick Science Park’s Business Innovation Centre in Binley and believes the site is the perfect location for such an ambitious company.

Penny said: “Malleus is a fine example of a company with great prospects for growth, which will only benefit from being based at the Business Innovation Centre.

“The way our tenancy agreements are structured, coupled with the range of units the site boasts, provides companies with a number of different options when the time comes to expand.

“Not only that, but our central location, and relationship with the University of Warwick, means firms receive many of the different factors required for growth, all in one place.”